1.
Caribbean Arts and
Popular Culture in
the Region and Its
Diaspora
Caribbean Studies
#7
By Tracia Walcott

2.
Raymond Williams
• Culture is defined as the way of life of a people or an entire
population. It is passed on from one generation to the next and
is evident in the language, customs, dressing, art, and other
norms and behavior found within that society.

3.
Objectives
• To define Caribbean art and Caribbean art forms
• To examine the historical and contemporary influences
that have helped to shape Caribbean culture and
Caribbean Art
• To articulate the contributions of several Caribbean
cultural theorists and artists
• To recognize the global impacts of Caribbean art forms

4.
Defining Caribbean Art
Caribbean art can be defined as all forms of creative
expression that are created by an artist who has a Caribbean
heritage.
• “Caribbean art varies from island to island and from place
to place because the islands are separate with different
languages and dialects, cultures and religions”
In spite of this Kamau Brathwaite, esteemed Barbadian poet
and theorist, argues that there are some features that most
Caribbean art forms share:

5.
Characteristics of
Caribbean Art
• Creolised/Hybrid
• Reflects the diversity of the region
• Nation Language
• Use Indigenous cultural material which reflects a shared
heritage
• Informed by post –modern/ post-colonial ideologies

6.
Caribbean Art Forms
• Rex Nettleford, Jamaican cultural critic and scholar,
suggests that there are an array of common Caribbean
forms including
 Literature - West Indian novels and short stories and
Critical theory
 Music- reggae, soca, dance hall, merengue, zouk, son
salsa, rumba
 Dance
 Religion
 Visual Art

7.
Caribbean Art Forms
Festival Arts-
Masquerade as
street theatre
Design
Music
Dance

8.
Nettleford on Caribbean
Art Forms (1990)
• “ What is important is the Caribbean product, from the
process of cross-fertilization over time, since it is this that
will cut across old imperial boundaries which still attempt
to hyphenate the region into Franco-that or Hispanic-this .
.”

9.
Influences on Caribbean
Artistic Expression &
Culture
• Migration- (African, Asian, Diasporic)
• Globalisation-
• Media and Technology-
• Social and Political Conditions- (steel pan /oil industry,
land ship, social injustice,
• Pan African and Post Colonial Movements Religion
(Rastafarian movement, spiritual baptist,)

10.
Popular Culture vs
Culture
• There are a number of generally agreed elements
comprising popular culture. For example, popular culture
encompasses the most immediate and contemporary
aspects of our lives. These aspects are often subject to
rapid change, especially in a highly technological world
in which people are brought closer and closer by
omnipresent media.

11.
Popular Culture and
Power
• What is popular in the society is not always agreed on by
everyone within the society so although popular culture is
sometimes referred to as “the culture of the people” very
often this also involves a struggle between popular sub-
cultures and what can be considered mainsteam

12.
Caribbean Popular Culture
Popular Culture
Bashment Soca
• Whose music is it?
• Has its endorsement by
the NCF affected how it
is perceived by members
of society?
Mainstream
Acceptance???

13.
The Struggle is Real!
• Dancehall vs Reggae
• Bob Marley or Skillibeng?
• Bob Marley is now a national icon in Jamaica and is
celebrated as revolutionary, innovative and legendary but
there was a time when he was not “mainstream” but was
marginalized because of his association with
Rastafarianism; he was not part of the sanitized image
that Jamaica was trying to construct.

14.
Contribution of Culture
and Arts to C’beam
Development
• Adds value to Tourism product through festival tourism
Festivals include food festivals, carnivals, music festivals
• Key to construction of national identities
• Tool for passing on mores, traditions values that are
considered to be important
• Sustains collective memories (history of a people)
• Defines the Caribbean diasporic space

15.
CONTRIBUTIONS MADE BY
CULTURAL THEORISTS,
ACTIVISTS AND ARTISTS
Caribbean Studies -

16.
Rex Nettleford –Ralston Milton
Nettleford (1933-2010)
• National patriot, cultural ambassador, international scholar, dancer, teacher, orator, critic and
mentor
• A committed academic, Nettleford engaged in a study of the Rastafarian movement
entitled, The Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica, alongside other noted Caribbean
scholars, M.G. Smith and Roy Augier. This one of a kind study, published in 1961, was later
credited with helping to give credibility to a social group which hitherto had been construed
as vagrants and social outcasts.
• In founding the Trade Union Education Institute at the University College, which he also
headed, in 1964, Nettleford further proved that he sought to improve the lot of the nation’s
underprivileged. n 1962,
• Nettleford gave life to another of his visions by founding the National Dance Theatre
Company of Jamaica (NDTC), an ensemble which focused on fusing together traditional
Jamaican music, dance and rituals within the European balletic framework. He acted as its
artistic director and prinicipal choreographer until his death in 2010.
• The exploration of a Caribbean cultural identity would become one of Nettleford’s favourite
subjects, and it dominated several of his academic pursuits. His writings and lectures reflect
a profound conviction in the creative power of the peoples of the region, a power struggling
to unleash itself from the conjunction of historical and neo-colonial forces.”

17.
Louise Bennett (1919-
2006)
• Jamaican poet, folklorist, writer, and educator. Writing and performing her poems
in Jamaican Patois or Creole, she worked to preserve the practice of presenting
poetry, folk songs and stories in patois ("nation language").
• She was described as Jamaica’s leading comedienne, as the “only poet who has
really hit the truth about her society through its own language”, and as an
important contributor to her country of “valid social documents reflecting the
way Jamaicans think and feel and live” Through her poems in Jamaican patois,
she raised the dialect of the Jamaican folk to an art level.
• Despite vehement criticisms from the upper classes and their concerted efforts to
sentence her works to a marginalized position in the emerging Jamaican literary
canon, Bennett has continued to use folk language to express the experience of
the ordinary Jamaican.
• Revolutionary who uses Jamaican Creole as a fundamental tool for bringing
respect and literary recognition to Jamaica‘s national language.

18.
Beryl McBurnie “ La Belle
Rosette”
(1917-2000)
• She was known as the Mother of Caribbean Dance. She has received many
awards and accolades throughout her life, among them the Golden Arrow Crown
from Guyana in 1966 and the Humming Bird Gold Medal of Honor from
Trinidad and Tobago in 1969. She was honored by the Alvin Ailey Dance
Company in New York in 1978 with Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus and
was among the six artists in the Caribbean honored at Carifesta in Barbados in
1981..
• The community in which she lived in Trinidad was bent on being very English.
What happened at funerals and at wakes of Black people and the dances of the
Hispanic Creoles was to be kept as far away from the community as possible.
This was an association with slavery, a step back, not a step forward. And yet,
Beryl was fascinated with these folk cultures. What she did in the 1930's and 40's
was seen by many as negative to the Black race in Trinidad and in other areas of
colonization who were trying to mimic the Whites.
• She was instrumental in taking Afro-Caribbean dance to the world,

19.
La Belle Rosette
• She orchestrated the cultural awakening that brought the
first steelband on stage, put folk culture into the
mainstream and imbued the independence movement
with a sense of cultural underpinning in the indigenous
arts.

20.
Paule Marshall
• Paule Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn, New York.
She visited Barbados, her parents’ birthplace, for the first time at the age
of nine. Marshall graduated from Brooklyn College in 1953 and graduate
school at Hunter College in 1955. Early in her life, Marshall wrote a
series of poems reflecting impressions of Barbados. Later, she turned to
fiction. She has published short stories and articles in various magazines.
She is best known for her novels and collections of short stories: Brown
Girl, Brownstones (1959), Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961), The
Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969), Praisesong for the
Widow (1983), Reena and Other Short Stories (1983),
and Daughters (1991). Marshall has lectured on black literature at
universities and colleges such as Oxford University, Columbia
University, Michigan State University, and Cornell University. She holds
a distinguished chair in creative writing at New York University

21.
Aubrey Cummings
(1947-2010)
• Aubrey Cummings was a Guyanese by birth and it was there he started his
musical career, After migrating to Barbados, Cummings would establish an active
musical career as guitarist and vocalist. In 1984 and again in 1985, Cummings
won the Best Male Vocalist Award in Barbados. During the same period, he
consistently won prizes at the Caribbean Song Festivals organized by the
Caribbean Broadcasting Union. His guitar work also attracted critical acclaim,
and he was a regular contributor to the acoustic guitar festivals organized by
Barbados' National Cultural Foundation. According to Aubrey Cummings, he said
that popular music contributed to the healing of Guyana during the 1960s and
1970s and can do so again. His musical career is a reminder of the pervasiveness
of music in Guyanese social life.
• Throughout his musical career, the influence of race, class, and colour in Guyana
during the 20th century can be found in his music. His experiences demonstrated
that Guyanese musicians worked hard. This attribute paid off as many of the
musicians of Cummings's era who have migrated established satisfying careers
overseas. Overall, it can be said by many that Aubrey Cummings is not only a
musician of a generation, he is a cultural hero.

22.
Further Research
• Reasearch the contributions of Martin Carter as well as
Kamau Brathwaite

23.
To Conclude
• Caribbean art has been essential to the ideological, social
and national development of the region
• Site of resistance to European domination; patriarchy and
racism
• Mode of expression for marginalized in society
• Evidence of the influence of African cultural practices
which were not erased, merely transformed through
processes of creolization and hybridization
• Tool for constructing national identity